Escape by Dominique Manotti Page B

technicalsystems are functioning correctly – heating, water pressure, power circuits, along with a dozen telephones. Each guard has a logbook on his desk to report any incidents. Which never occur. Stuck in front of the still, flat, ugly images of the screens blinking and flickering in the emptiness, Filippo feels giddy. Like many night watchmen probably, he fantasises about a disaster that would blur all the screens, set off all the alarms and create a reassuring chaos justifying, for a few minutes, the existence of his job. The temptation to provoke such an incident preys on him briefly before evaporating. His colleague Antoine, on the other hand, keeps himself busy. Unable to converse with Filippo, he flicks through old magazines, does crosswords, eats cake and snoozes.
    Filippo soon realises that he needs to find a way of filling his time, otherwise he’ll get depressed. Learn French? He tries for a while with an old Assimil method. And discovers that he has no incentive. Who does he want to speak French with? And what for?
Because my future is in France? What future? Before thinking about my future, I’d do better to try and get a grip on my present. The burning question: what am I doing here, far away from everything I know? I’m here because I jumped into that skip. I escaped, without planning to. Why did I jump? What made me do such a senseless thing?
    While his thoughts wander, he has got into the habit of doodling the leaves and scrolls of the acanthus fern – in black pencil, on white sheets of paper. In the near-contemplative silence, his hand is as free as his mind, and his doodles mingle with the rhythm of words. He’d jumped because he’d followed Carlo, like iron filings to a magnet. His thoughts always returned to Carlo. His form, so clear, so close, within reach, a warm glow – Filippo closes his eyes and holds out his hand, as he used to do in their cell, but only encounters emptiness. He hunches over his sheet of paper; his drawings overlap. Above all, Carlo is a voice, a language, and stories. The memories of never-ending nights spent listening to him flood backpowerfully, overwhelming him, those memories that he’d tried to bury, to destroy because he felt abandoned, betrayed. Carlo had the words to talk about the struggle of those heady years, the passion, the battle against slave labour, the thrill of the fight, the euphoria of victory, the agony of defeat and the joy of freedom, jubilant violence. Being prepared to put your life at risk, every day.
For a while I wanted to forget everything about him. Betrayal. Impossible
. Filippo is suffocating. The sheet of paper is now covered in black. He screws it into a ball, throws it into the waste-paper bin and picks up another.
    Gradually, the words in his head become sentences that fit together. On the page, a series of almost perfect circles overlap, intersect and reinforce one another.
I was blown away by everything Carlo told me; his passion, his hunger for freedom and his violence were the very stuff of my life in Rome, before jail. My horror of my mother’s exhausting, humdrum existence, my hatred of my father’s submissive, mediocre life, which he blotted out with alcohol to the point where he despised himself, my rebellion against the cops and my teachers, the crushing boredom of village life, and the feeling of not having a grip on anything, not counting for anything or for anyone, drove me to look for adventure among Rome’s squats. I wanted to live, but I didn’t know it, I’d never had the words to express all that. Never even the desire to express it. Carlo taught me that if I couldn’t find the right words to say who I am, I wouldn’t exist, not even in my own eyes. With his words, he justified my rebellion and salvaged my Rome years from being no more than a defeat. So naturally I followed him, I jumped into the skip. It was a free and necessary act
.
    Filippo stops scribbling, sits up, relaxes, breathes and drinks a glass of